It’s not hard to find a free logo. It could be clipart, a stock image you found on the internet, or maybe the guy who makes your vehicle decals offered to ‘do up a logo’ for your for free. Hey, even the IT guy knows a thing or 2 about graphic design right? While these may appear to have no cost associated, here is where you’ll pay:

Brand positioning
An experienced brand strategist and seasoned creative team can create an image that captures more than just what your company ‘does’. They can weave in the personality, aspirations and felt sense that you want your company to stand for over time. This is what separates authentic brand images from ‘logo’s. If your strategic position as a business (value, premium, boutique etc.) isn’t carefully crafted into your logo, the cost could be eroded pricing, premiums and missed customer engagements. People often will feel a certain way triggering a physical action based on a quick 2-second first impression, so you need to ask yourself; is the identity is really ‘speaking’ for your business?

Collateral Costs
Branding companies have the background and experience to see the complete landscape of future use for your company’s brand identity. Whether this is outdoor use, stationery, signage, vehicle, golf balls or the Good Year Blimp’ message board, a logo should be designed to be practical, legible and simple. It’s amazing how many times we’ve seen logos designed with a single purpose in mind and then require significant modifications over time.

Pre-Mature Rebrand
If you’ve been successful in your start-up, it may become evident very quickly that your logo is off the mark, it doesn’t stand for what the company is evolving into. This can trigger the need to re-design and re-launch the brand image far sooner than is normal resulting in confusion amongst your customers and prospects. It is certainly normal for companies to go through a systematic brand update from time to time, but these are often refreshes to sustain their growth rather than wholesale changes.

Ultimately, your brand should be authentic, unique, relevant and resilient. It’s unlikely that the source of the free logo was strategically engaged to a point of creating an identity that meets these criteria. We strongly encourage you to obtain the services of an experienced brand strategist or designer.

So, is a free logo really free? As my Dad used to tell me (at nauseam), “You get what you pay for, and you’ll pay for what you get!”.

The new identity needed to work towards both modernizing the club, and promoting the 2010 Provincial Grands & Alberta Championships – the sport’s premier provincial event that Calgary BMX Racing was chosen to host.

Drawing upon the diverse talents of our team, RFX was very enthusiastic about taking the project on, and offered our services for nothing more than in-kind support.

Art Director, Bryan McCloskey’s past experiences in skateboarding apparel design strongly contributed to striking the right tone and balance of the new logo design, combined with a custom illustration (by Jason Klapak also of RFX) in the form of a promotional poster, cemented an exciting new creative identity platform for the club.

Response to the poster and new identity was overwhelming and helped Calgary BMX Racing present the best-attended and most successful BMX event ever held within the province of Alberta. Lance Mottershead, president of Calgary BMX Racing commented; “the on-point reinvention of the identity greatly advanced recognition of our club and brought a legitimacy to sport that hasn’t been recognized since it’s inclusion in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games”.

In early 2011 RFX was once again engaged to further broaden the Calgary BMX Racing brand by completely rebuilding the club’s stale and ineffective website.

Launched May 1^st, the new website is proving to be a most effective information tool for both new recruits and returning club members. With vastly improved functionality, clean interface and intuitive navigation, the Calgary BMX Racing website sets a new standard in not-for-profit sport organization communications.

1. Relevance: Companies and brands need to stay relevant to their target audience, and let’s face it, audiences change. When your target evolves and starts to sniff out competitors, it may be because they feel their first preference (you) is no longer relevant. Rebrands in this case often are accompanied by new product offerings.

2. Mergers & Acquisitions: When 2 companies are combined, there are likely 2 unique audiences left to communicate to. Sometimes it is a matter of re-packaging the company / brand in a way that will appeal to both. In other cases however, one of the brands may remain dominant, and simply go through a refresh.

3. Innovation: Technology surely evolves faster than any brand, and if your company / brand is dependent upon technology and you are consistently innovating, then a rebrand should follow your natural path of innovation. It is an outward expression of your companies evolution and will keep audiences coming back to see ‘what’s new’.

4. Reposition: Taking a brand to a new position is difficult (value to premium for example), and requires a company to think about the new audience they are hoping to acquire. They likely have a different DNA than the old audience, and it’s often best to re-launch a brand to target this new demographic. Often, brands will not necessarily rebrand a current label, but rather create a new freestanding brand to float into the market.

5. Rejuvenation: The greatest brands in the world consistently update and refresh their look to stay contemporary and fresh. We find that 10 years is often the max threshold for consideration of a rebrand. In cases where a company has a 25 year old ‘look’, they will probably find themselves looking over their shoulder often at the up and coming brands who are demonstrating innovation and business evolution. If you have the mind set of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ (pardon my backwoods grammar), I would encourage you to consider a ‘brand refresh’. This maintains and celebrates the history and heritage of your brand, but shows your audience (current and future) that you are adaptive to change.

6. Outgrowth: Small companies can become big companies if they’re good at what they do, but small companies often start with meager logo’s & visuals. This is mainly for budget reasons (or perhaps their artistically oriented nephew was commissioned for the original design in exchange for a box of shiny new pencil crayons). There comes a point when a company will become more sophisticated then the look they are carrying, and that is usually the best time to rebrand.

Reasons NOT to rebrand

1. Too young: If you’ve unrolled a company or brand to the marketplace in the past 3 years, it’s probably not the best time to rebrand. It takes time to evolve a brand into something genuine and unique, and it’s wise to avoid the costly process of rebranding to try and ‘sell’ more. Often, a different approach to marketing or new campaign can help.

2. Change for the sake of change: It’s not a great idea to rebrand if the only reason you have is because you ‘want’ to. If there is no new innovation, attitude, behavior or product position, then consumers will be left with a flat experience. Imagine if a restaurant sells crummy food, and start to lose market share. They decide to rebrand to bring people back, yet still sell the same crummy food. This is a sure recipe for failure (no pun intended) as they’ll almost certainly lose that customer for life.

Logo’s are a critical piece of the puzzle and here’s why. Before a brand has a chance to achieve greatness, it is judged thousands of times over. It sets the tone for how the brand is positioned. It gives visual queues to the consumer on what they should ‘expect’ from that brand. If the brand is set to hold a premium position in the market place, then the design should reflect a premium look. Consumers will expect to pay premium pricing, and you will eliminate pesky non consumers (cheapskates) from the mix. If the logo is designed to be the value leader, a simpler, slightly more generic look is often best. Take a look around and you can see the difference, KIA versus Mercedes, Banana Republic versus Wal-Mart. Coca Cola versus the ‘house’ brand.

Ultimately, a logo’s job is to set expectations, and be a unique signature for an organization. More importantly it represents the position the company expects to hold (we refer to it as relevance). If it doesn’t, you may have only 2 choices; re-brand or re-position. More on both topics in future posts!

After looking at the big picture, it seemed obvious that the very thing the average student relied on to get through classes was also the perfect symbol for Hudson’s energizing culture and value proposition. With an Energy Drink as a tested creative platform, RFX built a rich set of marketing collateral around the message of “stimulate your career” that conveyed the essence of their brand and resonated beautifully with their target audience. Having just launched the campaign in September ’08 the results are already in with increased attendance at information sessions and resumes to sift through. (We have an idea of what the client will be drinking in the coming months).

Starbucks, for example, has mastered the art of the “felt sense”. When asked, most Starbucks customers likely will share a similar experience with you: positive remarks about consistent product, consistent atmosphere, and a general positioning in their mind of Starbucks as a premium coffee destination.

So how does Starbucks do it, and how can you?

Starbucks starts everything with a documented promise, which could easily serve as an overall brand-promise: “To provide an uplifting experience that enriches people”s daily lives.” Interesting, primarily because it says nothing about their core (and truly overpriced) product: coffee! In fact, the entire culture of Starbucks is built around experience, first. They believe that if their partners (at Starbucks, employees are referred to as partners) are equipped with effective product knowledge first, then their minds are free to offer a sincere customer experience with every opportunity. This is the primary reason why Starbucks spends so little on advertising, and re-allocates the would-be advertising fund to human resource development, primarily in the areas of product knowledge and customer service training. 11,000 locations later, they have proven that they can build a world-class brand, without spending world-class dollars on product advertising. They believe that their best ad is the last customer that walked out of a Starbucks store, and they have proven it to be correct. The powers-that-be at Starbucks know full well that their people are often the first interaction customers will have with the brand and as such warrant the bulk of their promotional investment.

More than just focusing on their employees though, Starbucks also has aggressively pursued the positioning of their stores as being a “third destination” between work and home, and have thus oriented the in-store experience to match that of their take-out experience. Far from being limited to logos on coffee cups and store-fronts world-wide, the “felt sense” of the Starbucks brand extends to the overall physical space and experience of purchasing and enjoying Starbucks” product. Additionally, the true “advertising/marketing” budget Starbucks” allocates in its traditional markets is typically in the form of community partnership and engagement, like community program sponsorship, youth group support and as the hub of community interaction and engagement ” all experience-based; a better spend of money, and a far cry from the crass, in-your-face advertising other similar brands tend to favour.

Can the same principals be applied to other brands, even if they are not in the food service industry? Absolutely, and there are strategic experts *ahem* that can help with this process. We think of it as building a brand from the inside, out. It comes down to knowing when (and how) to invest your marketing, communication and HR dollars, and building the right strategy for your brand and business goals. If your company offers industrial tools, corporate accounting service, strategic consulting or even janitorial services, there is significant opportunity to apply similar philosophies, and build a genuine brand experience.

Start with a promise, make a wholesale commitment to executing it by training your employees, partners and associates, and define the guiding principals that determine (and differentiate) who you truly are. Do not enforce rules; rather, coach people on adopting the brand principles and remember that your people are often your greatest brand asset. Encourage an atmosphere of empowerment, and reward positive behavior. Most importantly, lead by example, and demonstrate sincere belief in what you are doing. Genuine brands start with stating beliefs, and sincere brands live by them.

The advertiser is Ford, and the product is the all-new 2007 Ford Edge, a new crossover vehicle added to Ford’s ever-expansive line of vehicles “built for life in Canada”. Two drivers pull up side by side in a seemingly mysterious location, and begin an exchange on the all-new features of the Ford Edge as compared to the BMW X5 crossover vehicle.

Wait, I’m sorry, did they say BMW?

OK, this is not a product versus product ad, like the Coke vs. Pepsi taste test where a company matches it’s product up to it’s closest competitor and tries to acquire additional market share within its own product category. If it was, there are countless other cross over vehicles in the same class as the Ford Edge that they could have resorted to in a “cross over vehicle taste test”.

Instead, they chose to challenge the intangible premium position that BMW holds in the consumer’s eye. BMW, the status-symbol-with-bonus-vehicle-offer which commands a 20% -50% pricing premium over similar products in the non-premium market (Ford, Chrysler, GMC) has now become the subject of position challenge by Ford. In other words, if you want the same performance and quality as a BMW X5, but don’t want to pay the extra 20 grand, then come over to Ford.

Perhaps they are saying that you are foolish if you spent that much extra dough on the premium choice with no added performance value? Perhaps they are trying to entice BMW owners to consider a move to the Ford lineup after their lease is up, or perhaps they are just trying to make current and future Ford owners feel special. At any rate, it is a gutsy move, and interesting trend in brand positioning.

A week later I saw a nearly identical concept, this time Hyundai’s Sante Fe versus the pricey Land Rover LR3. Shortly after that, Volkswagen put the Turbo Passat against the BMW 383i. More position challenges by mass producers versus premium producers.

While I don’t think McDonalds will be taking the Keg on anytime soon, and there is still no hard evidence that the Ford edge will get you as many dates as the BMW X5, keep an eye on the tube for more position challenges by mass market producers versus their premium industry counterparts. Even more interestingly, will BMW answer back?

In an industry where people account for a big part of a company’s competitive advantage, Hudson & Company Chartered Accountants is looking for new ways to attract the best. Despite being recognized as a 2007 Best Places to Work employer by Calgary Inc, the growing firm is exploring new avenues in its quest for hiring the finest stock of tomorrow’s accounting professionals. With current tactical HR efforts in full swing, they’ve asked RFX to help create a brand message and profile that resonate with its target, add leverage to their activities, and infuse appeal to their offering.

Beyond re-examining and re-crafting its brand character and identity, RFX is tasked with enhancing their online presence. Further development and integration of other brand touch points will follow suit. RFX’s proprietary set of brand management and alignment tools, such as BrandMatrix™ and BrandFolio™, was an added bonus to the relationship and, in Hudson’s view, one of the compelling factors in its selection of RFX over other local firms.

Established in 1973, Hudson & Company employs over 75 people and offers a full range of professional financial services, including accounting, auditing, corporate & personal tax planning, business valuations, and business management advisory services.